"Before a culture adopts the use of writing, when its knowledge is transmitted exclusively through oral means, it can very easily revise its history. It’s not intentional, but it is inevitable; throughout the world, bards and griots have adapted their material to their audiences and thus gradually adjusted the past to suit the needs of the present. The idea that accounts of the past shouldn’t change is a product of literate cultures’ reverence for the written word. Anthropologists will tell you that oral cultures understand the past differently; for them, their histories don’t need to be accurate so much as they need to validate the community’s understanding of itself. So it wouldn’t be correct to say that their histories are unreliable; their histories do what they need to do."
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People from New York (state)Science fiction authorsPeople from Washington (state)Hugo Award winnersNebula Award winners
Original Language: English
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The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling (pp. 226-227)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ted_Chiang
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Ted Chiang
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